HitCount Plugin

[steenih]

Since I updated GetSimple to 3.2 and want to have a look at the statistics, I get this on top of the page:

Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated; ..............

Why does this error message appear and how can I get rid of it without doing what it suggests? Do I need to update something in the Hitcount plugin? I didn't have that error with the older version of GetSimple.

The PHP warning refers to the &ambersands in lines 179-181 of "..../plugins/hitcount/backend.php" as pasted below

var hits = <?php echo json_encode(&$hits['country']); ?>;
var visits = <?php echo json_encode(&$visits['country']); ?>;
var titles = <?php echo json_encode(&$titles); ?>;

You can just remove the ambersands. They have been superflous since the advent of PHP 5 many years ago and are now deprecated as the warning says.